Vicious Vultures by Della Voss

Ravenous Relations · Book One

Twelve women. Twelve family gatherings. Twelve people who finally stopped paying.

Nadia was told it was a small dinner. Twenty people, her mother said. She counted seventy cars in the lot — and then found her own signature on a contract she had never seen.

Priya shot her sister's wedding for free, as a gift. Eighteen months later she found her own photographs in a client's advertising campaign.

Bernadette's father changed his beneficiary eight days before he died. She has read nine thousand claims files for a living. She knew what it meant before she finished the sentence.

And Tess stood in her grandmother's front room while the family divided a house full of treasures, handed her a box of junk, and told her to say thank you to her uncle — knowing exactly what was in that box, and saying nothing at all.

Vicious Vultures is twelve stories about the quiet one. The reliable one. The one who gets the call when something needs covering, and the silence when it doesn't. Each of these women walks into a room where everybody already knows how the evening is going to end.

It ends differently.

Nobody screams in these stories. Nobody throws a drink. Nobody has to — because in every one of them, the family made the same mistake. They never once asked what she actually did for a living.

Read this if you have ever been the family bank, the family fixer, or the family scapegoat. If you have ever sat in your car after a family dinner before starting the engine. If you want the version where she doesn't cry, doesn't shout, and doesn't pay.

Twelve complete stories· Della Voss